When the Raspberry Pi ships later this year, it will be delivered to your door as a finished unit. The more adventurous tinkerers among you, as well as adept system builders, have asked the Raspberry Pi Foundation why they can’t get them in kit form instead. The reason why that wasn’t considered is demonstrated in an image released by Broadcom . . . they are tiny. And unlike a typical system build using an x86 chip that just slots into place, installing these chips requires a very steady hand and just the right amount of solder.

-specs +reference documentation. Stuff that open-source drivers can be built with.

(We may complain with our closed GPU and networking hardware on x86, but the ARM guys have it far worse. On current ARM devices, it seems that the most trivial things (such as text I/O) require binary blobs.)